History Today

Imperialism and India, spies and seafarers, paganism and the polis: the first 12 of 25 historians choose their favourite new history books of 2024.

The spiritual marketplace is crowded – is there something Darwinian about it?

Where fraught national histories are concerned, do policies of remembrance and education work, or is it better to wipe the slate clean?

Surrealism – as formulated in André Breton’s manifesto a century ago in October 1924 – is regarded as one of the First World War’s artistic legacies. What are the others?

How do dissent and disagreement tip over into civil war? And is peace, when it comes, ever absolute?

East was East and West was West – until 1989. The Wall is gone, but are its Cold War demarcations still there?

Does a state need a book of rules by which to operate? And who are those rules for, anyway?

History is built with words. How have historians filled the silence that came before?

An old-fashioned feature of a fusty, inegalitarian past, when did the British stop knowing their place?

So called because it passed without a shot being fired, the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974 brought Portugal’s authoritarian Estado Novo to an end. Could the state have survived?